The Great Oppression

We are used to "hard times" meaning "too little." Might that phrase also mean "too much"?

Detail from a Work Projects Administration Poster by Shari Weisberg, (c. 1939).

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I am of the generation of Americans who will be the last to have had some sort of lived connection to the Great Depression of 1929-1939. I was not remotely alive then of course, nor were my parents. But as a child, to be in the house of an old person, such as my grandparents, or of other friends or relatives, was to be in the house of someone who had, in one way or another, been through hard times.

There was an aura about it, when I was small. They grew up in the Depression, was how younger grownups would explain small idiosyncracies of the older ones (wiping tinfoil to be carefully folded and saved for a second use, laboring over stuck knots so that a good piece of twine would not be cut, retying a broken rubber band to be reused later). The Depression. It sounded like a dip in history, or an unusually large sadness.

The collective hardships of that time, and of the following war years, created, understandably, certain patterns of behavior in those who lived through them. This is what any times do of course—they shape the people who live in them. Like a lathe turns wood to match a given form, so time turns us, to match the shape of the years that are passed over us. The bumps and dips in our shared cultural story shapes our stories. Life shapes our lives.

The Great Depression was a period in which the people of our society were collectively shaped by having too little. We associate that, rightly, with hardship. And of course that hardship, while far less widespread, is still very much here. Ye have the poor with you always, Christ said, and sadly, he has been proven correct. The signs of poverty are growing and obvious today, amid the (related?) symptoms of particularly sick and exotic forms of wealth.

I wish to make that point clearly, so that the following question does not seem either trite or insensitive. But if there is a particular and painful type of shared hardship that is the result of too little, might there not be a particular and painful type of shared hardship that is the result of too much?

If so, how might such a time shape us?